Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Proactive management outperforms reactive strategies for wildlife disease control
Published: 2024-05-14
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Finding effective pathogen mitigation strategies is one of the biggest challenges humans face today. In the context of wildlife, emerging infectious diseases have repeatedly caused widespread host morbidity and population declines of numerous taxa. In areas yet unaffected by a pathogen, a proactive management approach has the potential to minimize or prevent host mortality. However, we typically [...]
Simple and robust models of ecological abundance
Published: 2024-05-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
1. Counts of species in ecological samples are of interest when they tell us about community assembly processes. Older process-based models of count distributions are either complex, widely rejected, or not able to predict high unevenness. 2. I leverage a general strategy for deriving simple one-parameter models. A distribution of abundances x on a continuous scale is predicted from a [...]
Brownification shapes the food web of aquatic invertebrates: a review
Published: 2024-05-13
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Brownification, a global phenomenon of increasing surface water colour to yellow-brown hues, has an array of effects on drinking water supply and aquatic biodiversity. Aquatic invertebrates, as indicators of aquatic ecosystem health and providers of ecosystem services, have received limited attention in the context of water browning. In this review, we explored the effects of brownification on [...]
IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, Mangroves of New Zealand
Published: 2024-05-08
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Mangroves of New Zealand is a regional ecosystem subgroup (level 4 unit of the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology). It includes the marine ecoregions of Central New Zealand, Northeastern New Zealand and Three Kings-North Cape. Their mapped extent in 2018 was 281.7 to 296.2 km2, representing 0.2% of the global mangrove area. The biota is characterized by a single species: Avicennia marina subsp. [...]
IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, Mangroves of South India and Sri Lanka, and Maldives
Published: 2024-05-08
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Mangroves of South India and Sri Lanka, and Maldives is a regional ecosystem subgroup (level 4 unit of the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology). It includes the marine ecoregions of Western India, South India and Sri Lanka, and Maldives. The mapped extent in 2020 was 249.2 km2, representing 0.2% of the global mangrove area. The environmental settings of this ecoregion differ widely ranging from open [...]
Global review of shorebird tracking publications: Gaps and priorities for research and conservation
Published: 2024-05-07
Subjects: Animal Sciences, Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Ornithology, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Research Methods in Life Sciences
Electronic tracking has enabled rapid advances in knowledge of the movement behaviour and habitat use of shorebirds (Charadriiformes), and is thus making a growing contribution to their conservation. However, developing a useful coherent global strategy for tracking these taxa requires an overview of the current availability of data and how it varies along regional and ecological lines. To this [...]
MECHANISTIC MODEL OF VEGETATION STRUCTURE AND ANIMAL COMMUNITY INTERACTIONS-INTEGRATING GEDI & TLS DATA IN THE MADINGLEY MODEL
Published: 2024-05-07
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Population Biology
Background Vegetation structure is increasingly recognized as a key variable to explain ecosystems states and dynamics. New Remote Sensing tools are available to complement labor intensive field investigations and consider the global biogeography of this parameter. Objectives We propose to model the processes explaining the interaction between vegetation structure and animal community assembly [...]
IUCN Red List of Ecosystems, Mangroves of the Arabian (Persian) Gulf
Published: 2024-05-06
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Mangroves of the Arabian (Persian) Gulf is a regional ecosystem subgroup (level 4 unit of the IUCN Global Ecosystem Typology). It includes the marine ecoregions of the Arabian (Persian) Gulf, Gulf of Aden, Gulf of Oman, Western Arabian Sea and Western India (Asia). Mangroves of the Arabian (Persian) Gulf occupy sheltered intertidal lagoons along coastlines and offshore islands, occupying various [...]
Predator-Prey movement interactions: jaguars and peccaries in the spotlight
Published: 2024-05-05
Subjects: Behavior and Ethology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
Understanding how the landscape influences the distribution and behavior of predators and prey gives us insights into the spatial dynamics of their interactions and the factors that shape their populations across space and time. This study analyzed interactions between jaguars (Panthera onca) and white-lipped peccaries (Tayassu pecari) at different forest and grassland distances and under varying [...]
Revisiting Wolbachia detections: old and new issues in Aedes aegypti mosquitoes and other insects
Published: 2024-05-05
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Entomology, Life Sciences, Microbiology
Wolbachia continue to be reported in species previously thought to lack them, particularly Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. The presence of Wolbachia in this arbovirus vector is considered important because releases of mosquitoes with transinfected Wolbachia are being used around the world to suppress pathogen transmission and these efforts depend on a lack of Wolbachia in natural populations of this [...]
A dire need for better standards of data quality, transparency, and reproducibility in IUCN RedList assessments
Published: 2024-05-05
Subjects: Biodiversity, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The IUCN RedList is the most extensive source of information on the global extinction risk including over 157000 species. The sheer scale of this initiative presents challenges in data standards and reporting, especially given that legacy issues may reduce accuracy. Here, we assess the bibliographic underpinnings of RedList assessments for five taxa with fairly complete assessments (four [...]
University herbaria are uniquely important
Published: 2024-05-02
Subjects: Biodiversity, Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences
University herbaria play critical roles in biodiversity research and training and provide an interdisciplinary academic environment that fosters innovative uses of natural history collections. Universities have a responsibility to steward these important collections in perpetuity, in alignment with their academic missions and for the good of science and society.
MacArthur’s consumer-resource model: a Rosetta Stone for competitive interactions
Published: 2024-04-26
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Population Biology
Recent developments in competition theory, namely, Modern Coexistence Theory (MCT), have aided empiricists in formulating tests of species persistence, coexistence, and evolution from simple to complex community settings. However, the parameters used to predict competitive outcomes, such as interaction coefficients, invasion growth rates, or stabilizing differences, remain biologically opaque, [...]
Addictive manipulation: a perspective on the role of reproductive parasitism in the evolution of bacteria-eukaryote symbioses
Published: 2024-04-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Evolution, Other Microbiology
Wolbachia bacteria encompass noteworthy reproductive manipulators of their arthropod hosts. which influence host reproduction to favour their own transmission, also exploiting toxin-antitoxin systems. Recently, multiple other bacterial symbionts of arthropods have been shown to display comparable manipulative capabilities. Here we wonder whether such phenomena are truly restricted to arthropod [...]
Historic residential segregation impacts biodiversity data availability disparately across the tree of life
Published: 2024-04-23
Subjects: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences, Race and Ethnicity, Research Methods in Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Urban Studies and Planning
Urbanization alters species ranges and nature’s contributions to people, motivating urban conservation. Residential segregation policies have left an indelible impact on urban environments, greenspaces, and wildlife communities, creating socioeconomic heterogeneity and altering biota. However, the extent to which data sufficiently capture urban biodiversity patterns remains unclear, especially [...]